Lecture series continues with UCSF’s Blackburn

Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D.

Lecture series continues with UCSF’s Blackburn

Elizabeth Blackburn, Ph.D., who has pioneered understanding of an enzyme that helps keep one's genetic material from unraveling, will deliver the next Discovery Lecture on Thursday, Jan. 10, 2008.

Blackburn, the Morris Herzstein Professor of Biology and Physiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, will discuss “Telomeres and Telomerase in Health and Disease” at 4 p.m. in 208 Light Hall.

Like the reinforced tips of shoelaces, telomeres are short sections at the end of chromosomes that maintain the integrity of the genome.

Blackburn and colleagues at Johns Hopkins and Harvard shared the 2006 Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for their prediction and discovery of telomerase, the remarkable enzyme that keeps these tips intact, and which plays a role in human cancer and aging.

For a complete schedule of the Discovery Lecture Series and archived video of previous lectures, go to www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/discoveryseries.